Microsoft had buyers lined up for Lionhead, could’ve saved ‘Fable’ series

[dropcap size=small]A[/dropcap]s most people already know the UK-based game developer, and Fable series developer, Lionhead sadly went out of business last month. What most did not know was that Microsoft had multiple buyers in place to buy Lionhead but a deal could not get done to save Lionhead and Fable.

During the consultation period, a period of time a company must explore other ways to continue business without closing as mandated by UK law, multiple buyers had lined up to buy Lionhead. According to Kotaku UK some of the potential buyers were very large gaming developers and they had placed offers of hundreds of millions to buy Lionhead. Many had even written letters of intent to buy Lionhead, so the secret negotiations were pretty far along.

The negotiations stalled and eventually were thrown away altogether because of one sticking point with Microsoft, Microsoft was unwilling to let go of the Fable IP. After this point many of the buyers left the table and a deal was unable to be made with the remaining companies. The Fable IP was the reason many of the companies had even wanted to buy Lionhead in the first place so without Fable there was not much of an interest in Lionhead. If a company had bought Lionhead, the only way for them to continue making Fable games would be to enter a licensing agreement with Microsoft and many of the potential buyers were unwilling to do that.

Sadly, we will never get to experience Fable Legends and any future Fable games created by Lionhead because Microsoft wanted to keep Fable all to its self.